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Riot Games' League Of Legends Officially Becomes Most Played PC Game In The World

For fans of eSports, there’s a shift going on that for the most part has gone under the radar. New data from Xfire shows that Riot Games’ League of Legends is now officially the most played PC game in North America and Europe. When you add in the rise of the game in Korea, where it’s already beating out StarCraft II as the most popular game, it’s clear that League of Legends is here to stay.

According to a new list provided by DFC Intelligence in conjunction with Xfire, League of Legends gamers logged nearly 1.3 billion hours of gameplay. In second place was World of Warcraft, which despite some usage declines, still registered more than 600 million hours of gameplay (not including Asia).

“The fact that online games such League of Legends eclipsed more than a billion hours of online game time in a year is simply incredible and a testament to the fundamental shift currently sweeping through the games industry. By comparison, Bungie recently announced that the Halo franchise surpassed two billion hours of online play, but that’s over a period of seven years.” said David Cole, CEO of DFC Intelligence.

The report notes the recent popularity of the new Blizzard Entertainment title, Diablo III.

“Diablo III was not released until mid-May, but in just 45 days, usage of the game has equaled 172 million hours. Usage of course declines after launch, but it is still doing quite well and may surpass World of Warcraft in usage over the next year” said Cole.

The list was prepared by extrapolating from actual usage data from more than 21 million Xfire members from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012.

“The Xfire application lets us examine the real-time data of users as they play any of our more than 2,000 supported games,” said Malcolm CasSelle, CEO of Xfire. “The resulting information lets us model all sorts of variables and situations that could impact publishers, investors and consumers.”

The new report is part of an ongoing initiative between DFC Intelligence and Xfire to better understand the products that core PC gamers interact with. The report is part of the DFC GamesPulse Matrix, a complex and comprehensive multi-source database from providers like Xfire, which tracks millions of gamers’ activity down to the second. The newly released Blizzard Analyst Tracker data product allows investors and industry trend watchers to see daily trends in gameplay across all Blizzard titles and several of their top competitors. Custom reports and ongoing analysis of actual gameplay data for more than 1,500 games is available by contacting DFC Intelligence.

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Hahaha Yeah Good Well You know wy LoL is so Famous because The Fan can Create Custom skin And Login and Other Stuff for The Game And so much Stuff you Got a PBE serve To test items they have Competitions Great Staff Very Warm hearted people in The Riot Game and they have alot of Dedicated Fans i For one are Because i make Custom UI ,Login and Custom skins and 3D models For League of legends But yeah am Demgamiez In youtube you Can search my channel i do Just simple Love That Game

The title is extremely inaccurate and VERY misleading to the readers… Using the word “Official” ? By such a lack-luster standard (X-Fire)… I am not bashing X-Fire but I have been gaming for years and remember using X-Fire playing Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2… Now I never hear of anyone using it… I know it’s still a fairly popular client, but using data compiled from X-Fire and calling it “official” is far from appropriate… Furthermore this data does not factor in any outside factors (such as people AFK-ing and such in game lobbies). You also mentioned in your article it doesn’t include Asia… You’re excluding an extremely large portion of both gaming communities, and yet you’re going to claim the compiled data as “official” ? I am not bashing Riot Games by any means, (I love League of Legends; and in-fact I’ve been playing more LoL than WoW over the past few months… so I’m not saying it’s an impossibility given how much WoW has declined over the past year or two) but this article seems poorly thought out…

Either way, If one doesn’t Tag thier games to X-fire or Steam then the data is inaccurate. As i stated in another response here, I play WoW and i don’t have it run through X-Fire or Staem. so my hours logged would not be counted towards it nor do many of my friends that play the game.